[foundation-board] follow up questions

Wed Sep 20 08:08:04 UTC 2017

Hi Mark, Pavel -

A couple follow up thoughts after a night of tossing and turning:

1. One thing that wasn't clear to me in last night's conversation is 
cash flow - specifically, when is the cliff (at current spend rate)?

This is different than the date by which we would need to make cuts, 
which needs to be well in front of the cliff (to Tim's point about not 
waiting until it's too late to cut).  But I think clarity on the cliff 
(i.e, "we can't pay bills or employees any more") will help bring focus 
to the speed at which we need to get the financial health on a better 
track in order to back away from that dangerous cliff edge.

2.  I spent more time with the 2018 spreadsheet, and I can't understand 
the connection between the Income Pipeline tab and the income section on 
the OKI Planned Budget tab.  I don't see formulas which link the two 
tabs, nor do I see a clear correlation between the numbers.  Can you 
explain exactly how these two tabs are related?

3. Related to #2 above, I can't tell how large the funding gap is. The 
budget has a deficit of -366K.  Does that mean we need to find an 
additional 366K in SAG, which implies additional 2018 overall funding of 
2.4M (at 15% rate) beyond what is in the budget?

4. The other thing I'd like to mention with regards to the "safe" 
scenario budget you are preparing is that (in my opinion) we only want 
to make one round of cuts, as opposed to multiple rounds of shaving 
smaller pieces off.  The latter is much harder to recover from in terms 
of trust and morale. And while the former is much harder initially, it 
should ensure safety and provide an ability to regrow when finances 
allow.  If we end up in that scenario, I think we have to stomach deep 
cuts to ensure the future of the org rather than optimistic shaving of 
costs.

thanks
Jane